English

Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search under Multi-Attribute Range Filter

Databases 2026-02-18 v1

Abstract

Nearest neighbor search on high-dimensional vectors is fundamental in modern AI and database systems. In many real-world applications, queries involve constraints on multiple numeric attributes, giving rise to range-filtering approximate nearest neighbor search (RFANNS). While there exist RFANNS indexes for single-attribute range predicates, extending them to the multi-attribute setting is nontrivial and often ineffective. In this paper, we propose KHI, an index for multi-attribute RFANNS that combines an attribute-space partitioning tree with HNSW graphs attached to tree nodes. A skew-aware splitting rule bounds the tree height by O(logn)O(\log n), and queries are answered by routing through the tree and running greedy search on the HNSW graphs. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that KHI consistently achieves high query throughput while maintaining high recall. Compared with the state-of-the-art RFANNS baseline, KHI improves QPS by 2.46×2.46\times on average and up to 16.22×16.22\times on the hard dataset, with larger gains for smaller selectivity, larger kk, and higher predicate cardinality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.15488,
  title  = {Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search under Multi-Attribute Range Filter},
  author = {Yuanhang Yu and Dawei Cheng and Ying Zhang and Lu Qin and Wenjie Zhang and Xuemin Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15488},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:39:47.433Z